Due to proliferation of smart phones, data traffic in cellular networks has been significantly increasing, which has resulted in congestions in cellular networks. Data offloading to a complementary network such as Wi-Fi has been identified as a rational and cost-effecti
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Due to proliferation of smart phones, data traffic in cellular networks has been significantly increasing, which has resulted in congestions in cellular networks. Data offloading to a complementary network such as Wi-Fi has been identified as a rational and cost-effective solution to these congestions. In this paper, a multi-criteria offloading (MCO) mechanism is proposed to select the best transfer mode among: cellular delivery, delay-tolerant offloading (DTO) to a complementary network, and peer-assisted offloading (PAO). The proposed MCO mechanism utilizes TOPSIS multi-criteria decision analysis method and a prediction model for the Wi-Fi connection pattern. The decision criteria include: the fraction of total users’ request satisfied by offloading, data transfer costs of cellular operator to users, data transfer bandwidth of users in both cellular and complementary networks, and total users’ power consumption. To evaluate the proposed mechanism various scenarios have been simulated, and the results show that the MCO mechanism can successfully take into account the preferences of the cellular operator and its users. Through simulations, the MCO mechanism demonstrated superior performance in comparison with other proposed solutions in the literature in terms of balancing the load on the network, reducing the cost of the cellular operator, and reducing energy consumption of the users.
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